wrote
about you--but Grundt was to have come...."

"Listen," I said, "Grundt could not come. We had to separate and he sent
me on ahead...."

"But ... but ..."--the man was stammering now in his anxiety--"... you
succeeded?"

I nodded.

He heaved a sigh of relief.

"It will be awkward, very awkward, this change in the arrangements," he
said. "You will have to explain everything to him, everything. Wait
there an instant."

He darted back into the room.

Once more I stood and waited in that silent place, so restful and so
still that one felt oneself in a world far removed from the angry strife
of nations. And I wondered if my interview--the meeting I had so much
dreaded--was at an end.

"Pst, Pst!" The elderly man stood at the open door.

He led me through a room, a cosy place, smelling pleasantly of leather
furniture, to a door. He opened it, revealing across a narrow threshold
another door. On this he knocked.

"Herein!" cried a voice--a harsh, metallic voice.

My companion turned the handle and, opening the door, thrust me into the
room. The door closed behind me.

I found myself facing the Emperor.

CHAPTER IX

I ENCOUNTER AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE WHO LEADS ME TO A DELIGHTFUL SURPRISE

He stood in the centre of the room, facing the door, his legs, straddled
apart, planted firmly on the ground, one hand behind his back, the
other, withered and useless like the rest of the arm, thrust into the
side pocket of his tunic. He wore a perfectly plain undress uniform of
field-grey, and the unusual simplicity of his dress, coupled with the
fact that he was bare-headed, rendered him so unlike his conventional
portraits in the full panoply of war that I doubt if I should have
recognized him--paradoxical as it may seem--but for the havoc depicted
in every lineament of those once so familiar features.

Only one man in the world to-day could look like that. Only one man in
the world to-day could show, by the ravage in his face, the appalling
weight of responsibility slowly crushing one of the most vigorous and
resilient personalities in Europe. His figure, erstwhile erect and
well-knit, seemed to have shrunk, and his withered arm, unnaturally
looped away into his pocket, assumed a prominence that lent something
sinister to that forbidding grey and harassed face.

His head was sunk forward on his breast. His face, always intensely
sallow, almost Italian in its olive tint, was livid. All its alertness
was go